As reported in the mainstream media some people have identified strange URLs in the verbose manifesto of the 22-july-maniac from Norway. Rolf Frøysa, DataGuard AS, was interviewed by Norwegian TV2 about it and since then several people are working on breaking the code of the strange URLs in the document. A web page, a chat channel and a mailing list have been set up. The URLs are available here. An example is:

So far it has been noted that the “strange URLs” are not a URLs: There are numbers above 255. Very likely the four first numbers should be interpreted as world coordinates. In this case: 52.068 and 4.309. One coordinate is close to the Liverpool Street Station in London. A Google Map with indication of all the coordinates has been setup. It is apparent that the coordinates are mostly in large European cities. It was noted on the mailing list that the coordinates all fall in Western European countries. Exceptions are smaller countries and Italy and Denmark with right-wing populist tendencies. Some may fall close to socialist party offices.

The next part of the strange URL is either plusf or subf. These two words are likely to mean plus/addition and substraction/minus. Morten Rand-Hendriksen suggested that the word simply indicated that one should add the the next number to the longitude, e.g., 4.309 + 24/1000. For the Oslo coordinate that would put the spot on the criminal police HQ, where it prior had been close to Oslo Central Station. One person reported that the scheme did not work for the Dutch coordinates. another person constructed an interactive map where one could explore the different combinations of additions and substractions for plusf/subf.

What the next letters mean is unclear and neither the following numbers are understood. The two last letters may be Serbian when interpreted as UTF-8. The perpetrator has had a “Balkan obsession” which could explain it. But what the two letters exactly mean is unclear.

There are few zeros in the long number. One person on the mailing list noted that at least the Brussel number could be a UNIX time code. The number for Brussel is 673468422 and with the interpretation that this is a UNIX time code we get the 5th May 1991. The Brussel number is however, shorter than the rest, so the other numbers cannot directly be interpreted as UNIX time codes. However, if these numbers are regarded as time codes in milliseconds rather than seconds it is possible to convert them to an appropriate date. I tried that for a couple of the codes and the result is listed below.

Place

Timestamp?

Date

Possible event (Wikipedia)

Stockholm

569218397413

1988-01-15

In Jerusalem, Israeli police and Palestinian protestors clash at the Dome of the Rock; several police and at least 70 Palestinians are injured.

Wien

123271869374

1973-11-27

The United States Senate votes 92–3 to confirm Gerald Ford as Vice President of the United States.

The investigation did not give a final conclusive result. The person on the mailing list suggested that the 5th May 1991 was associated with the Croatian War of Independence. I cannot find material on Wikipedia that supports this hypothesis strongly. I constructed a small program that would plot the distribution of the digits in the number (see the figure). There was a few perculiarities: As noted before zero seldomly occures. For the first digit ‘6’ occures frequent and ‘1’ occures frequent in the seventh and nineth letter. Maybe the number should be split in two, so the seventh digit becomes the first digit in the second number.

The letters in front of the number are particular strange. The seem not to be usual hash codes, such as trip codes.

Below are the links to Open Street Map with the coordinates: The original as well as the ones where the subf/plusf number has been added.